Hi everyone,I always play the paladin in shining armor who heals everyone on his way to haven but this time when playing Skyrim I've decided to take a slightly different approach and play a criminal scum.I've joined the thieves guild, but the things I did there weren't really all that terrible, stealing and taking money from people, ok, whatever.

The Dark Brotherhood on the other hand...Man, these quests were just messed up. Some of them, one including an old lady and a large container (I don't want to spoil anything) had me shivering all over while those normal 'assassination' missions felt wrong when your victim is crying 'please don't kill me'Nothing came close to my last target though, where I had to kill the bride during her wedding.I tried many different ways (the wonders of save and load) but the one where I use my Nightingale Subterfuge power (forces everyone in an area to fight each other for 30 seconds) turning the wedding into a bloodbath while I watch from above was the most memorable...Honestly, I made the bride assault her husband with a dagger just to watch her getting slaughtered by everyone around her. I guess I'm officially evil by now.

The weirdest thing is that while I never play the bad guy and I'm always the paladin, I enjoy those assassinations... I hope I'm not turning into a psycho.

Anyway, what's the most evil thing you've done in a game recently? (Only voluntary actions though, cutscenes and obligatory story missions don't count)

In Fallout 3 I blasted Megaton into radioactive rubble and sold several people into slavery, though that wasn't very recent.For more recent evil deeds, in RPGs I have left teammates to die simply because they were either annoying or proved no further(if any) use to me.And in Infamous 2, on the evil path, I killed surrendering enemies and slaughtered civilians for such petty reasons as being in my way or yelling at/insulting me.

Well on my high chaos ending in Dishonoured when Sam tells you he's through working with you because you've gone too far and starts to slowly sail away I shot him in the back and carried on. It felt like the right thing to do and to its credit, the game didn't give him invincibility frames on leaving which I half expected.

If only the game had anticipated my elaborate way of making Lady Boyle's assassination look like an accident. Let's just say there's a bath in her room and she's currently unconscious... Anything is better than the non-lethal option in that mission y'know. That shit was fucking chilling.

God of War 3 has that delightful scene where you drag a poor slave girl across enemy filled hallways, and then use her to prop up a heavy gate winch, which proceeds to brutally crush her as you walk through the gate.

The Wykydtron:Well on my high chaos ending in Dishonoured when Sam tells you he's through working with you because you've gone too far and starts to slowly sail away I shot him in the back and carried on. It felt like the right thing to do and to its credit, the game didn't give him invincibility frames on leaving which I half expected.

I had something similar happen to me, except by accident.

He said his little speech, then drew his pistol and went to fire a shot into the air. I realised what he meant to do, whipped out my crossbow and shot him with a nonlethal tranq dart.

Whereupon he fell unconscious into the water and was eaten by some hagfish.

If only the game had anticipated my elaborate way of making Lady Boyle's assassination look like an accident. Let's just say there's a bath in her room and she's currently unconscious... Anything is better than the non-lethal option in that mission y'know. That shit was fucking chilling.

Funny enough; I did take the non-lethal approach to that and I didn't realize until it was too late what I had done and how it was worse than death. I usually play the paladin when given the option but I rolled with this one rather than reloading. I'm not sure if it counts for me or against me that I wasn't trying to be evil in doing it; I genuinely thought at the time that it was the kinder thing to do.

CrazyCrab:Nothing came close to my last target though, where I had to kill the bride during her wedding.I tried many different ways (the wonders of save and load) but the one where I use my Nightingale Subterfuge power (forces everyone in an area to fight each other for 30 seconds) turning the wedding into a bloodbath while I watch from above was the most memorable...Honestly, I made the bride assault her husband with a dagger just to watch her getting slaughtered by everyone around her. I guess I'm officially evil by now.

I actually joined every faction and did all of their quest lines in the one playthrough of Skyrim. I enjoyed the assassinations too; particularly the wedding one. Like you, I reloaded and tried it in a variety of ways for the challenge but I never thought (probably cus I didn't have the ability) to use Subterfuge. I laughed out loud at that :D Very deliciously evil. I think I just put an arrow through her head from a vantage point and used a planned escape route with traps for pursuers and horse waiting.

I think it's more enjoyable to be evil like that when it's not the usual "puppy-kicking evil for the sheer sake of it". It's just business for an assassin and the challenge of escaping the guards adds some thrill to it. It's why when I became a highly wanted criminal in Markarth (can't remember how); I left it that way. Anytime I had to go there, I knew it would be a challenge in itself to find a way to do it undetected, or I'd have to fight my way through.

I still feel guilty for killing The Fair Lady (Quelaag's terminally ill sister) in Dark Souls on one of my playthroughs, I mean I felt bad for her plight and she soooooooo didn't deserve it, especially after I killed her sister whom was providing for her and all but... she has that Firekeeper soul... one more Estus upgrade could be the difference between life and death late game y'know...

I once created a fucking awesome trap is Space Station 13. Using goon station's mechanic system, I created a room(accessed via teleporter) that threw you into a wall(which does massive amounts of brute damage) every time you spoke/moved. There was no escape and no way to call for help. Everyone that entered the room fucking died horribly.

Resolving an argument in Skyrim concerning someone's guilt/innocence by killing everyone involved. It was obvious that *someone* was lying, but with no way to tell who this was the most efficient way to resolve it.

Also a few war crimes, a genocide or two come to mind, but most of those were commited in cutscenes (even though through voluntary action and could have been averted) so I'm not sure they count in this context.

The Wykydtron:Well on my high chaos ending in Dishonoured when Sam tells you he's through working with you because you've gone too far and starts to slowly sail away I shot him in the back and carried on. It felt like the right thing to do and to its credit, the game didn't give him invincibility frames on leaving which I half expected.

If only the game had anticipated my elaborate way of making Lady Boyle's assassination look like an accident. Let's just say there's a bath in her room and she's currently unconscious... Anything is better than the non-lethal option in that mission y'know. That shit was fucking chilling.

CrazyCrab:Anyway, what's the most evil thing you've done in a game recently? (Only voluntary actions though, cutscenes and obligatory story missions don't count)

By far one of my Civilization III plays. In fact, I've done two utterly terrible, awful, horrific things in the same game. The first was basically playing Hitler. Since foreign citizens cause trouble in cities, every city I'd capture, I'd build Workers until the city remained at the population of 1, thus letting it grow into my own people and easily assimilating the one foreign citizen left. The rest toiled as a slave worker army, their job mostly being to clear pollution caused by my factories.

The other? Well, let me set the scene for you. Earth map, Huge. My civilization, originally based in North America, now holds both American continents and small patches of territory in North Africa, mostly for tactical purposes. Netherlands, the second largest civilization, holds Europe and a small part of west Asia. England and France split most of the rest of Asia in half, with Brits on the west and the Frenchies in the East. Small civilizations are around Russia and I can't remember who holds Africa. Finally, the Iroquois have Australia, small, but rich in resources, most importantly, Uranium and my eyes are set on it for the next conquest.

I have a ton of ICBMs that I haven't been using up to that point. I'm concerned with global warming (green Hitleresque nation, just imagine!), but suddenly realise that, since the game burns down forests first (that I always cut down anyway) and I can seed the uninhabited Canadian tundras with my armies of Workers at leisure, it is no longer an issue. The only problem remains - a single ICBM brings down the wrath of all the nations upon me. So I decide to start World War III.

The execution is quite simple actually. As the most powerful and aggressive nation, there aren't many who would refuse my "protection" - I forge a Mutual Defense Pact - a diplomatic agreement that, if anyone declares war on me, the allied nation stands with me against them - with geographically appealing nations. I ally with the English, a small civilization around Russia and the civilization that holds Africa, meaning that if and when Netherlands, France and the other small nations in Russia declare war with me, they have a threat that's right there near their borders. The Brits won't defeat them of course - they will be torn apart from every side, but the threat at home is time enough for me to take over Australia and move north to take what's left of France, them holding a few appealing Wonders and all.

As my navy gets in position near Australia, I fire off a single ICBM on the Iroquois' ships.

What little they had as their navy is now nearly demolished and the whole world is thrown at war. The plan goes off without a hitch, everyone who declares war on me gets declared war on themselves by my allies that share borders with them. Their armies are mostly decimated in the infighting while my army takes over Australia (small divisions take over a few key points in south Asia, allowing me to base my bombers there as an additional distraction and aerial support), then moves north and quickly captures several key French cities. By the time the pacts expire and my allies come back to their senses and turn on me, they have nothing to fight with and my armies are there in full strength, with a strong aerial superiority. The only serious threat during the war, the Netherlands, has had every single productive city hit by nuclear warheads, nullifying their production and any hope they had at building an army to stand against me.

The punchline is that I could've easily taken over Australia with just my armies. I've thrown the entire world into a chaotic war and turned Europe into a nuclear wasteland on a whim because I was bored of not using my nuclear arsenal.

Well, I once murdered an entire Venetian noble house because they made a fool out of my character at a masked ball which made me lose 50 prestige.

I also found out that castration solves a lot of problems. For example, a character of mine, the Byzantine emperor, had two sons. One of them was a dim witted fool while the other one was a strong, skilled warrior. So I implicated my first son in a plot against me after which I imprisoned and castrated him. Since castrated males don't inherit or get claims this meant that my second son would become emperor.

Yeah, Crusader Kings II will make you really think about your moral values after a while.

Probably in Fable 2. Killing everyone in Bowerstone, both civilian and guard because "fuck it". It seemed like it was a good idea at the time... or something. Also marrying someone and then bringing them to the Wheel of Misfortune just to get an achievement. I was a bad person.

mmmm, not sure if it applies, but in Total War games I tend to chase running enemies with cavalry just because. There is no real strategic value, but if they dared oppose me they might as well suffer!!I tend to be just as ruthless with my own troops, sending units to lure enemies, knowing perfectly well that they are all dead men.

Similar situation in Mount and Blade Warband, I have started wars just to annoy the king I was serving at the moment, then switch sides to another faction, and attack my previous king on two fronts, killing peasants and destroying everything in my path.

The Wykydtron:Well on my high chaos ending in Dishonoured when Sam tells you he's through working with you because you've gone too far and starts to slowly sail away I shot him in the back and carried on. It felt like the right thing to do and to its credit, the game didn't give him invincibility frames on leaving which I half expected.

If only the game had anticipated my elaborate way of making Lady Boyle's assassination look like an accident. Let's just say there's a bath in her room and she's currently unconscious... Anything is better than the non-lethal option in that mission y'know. That shit was fucking chilling.

whats the problem with the non-lethal option?

She gets taken by boat to an undisclosed location by some random stranger who was likely stalking her beforehand where "nobody will ever see her again" I can see the creepy shrine built in her name already. Seriously did you listen to the voice acting he puts on? He manages to sound somewhat normal until he actually gets her in the boat then he goes crazy weird. Trust me, i've watched enough dark anime (read: Mirai Nikki) to know when you really don't want that type of person to "love" you. She's chained up in a basement for the rest of her life most likely.

Still, some people might prefer that over death I guess. It might be an interesting experience I suppose, if you're into that kind of thing.

I think it's more enjoyable to be evil like that when it's not the usual "puppy-kicking evil for the sheer sake of it".

I agree, though I think "puppy-kicking evil for the sheer sake of it" has it's place, it's far better when the evil has some halfway sensible justification to go along with it. What I think is most important about evil actions though is subtlety and manipulation. Most all evil choices I've ever encountered the player is reduced to little more than a psychopathic thug, hurting and killing others in the most blatant way possible, and concerned solely with increasing the body count as much as possible. The best evil choices are ones where the player does evil things without anybody knowing they did it or able to do anything about it, or better, if the player is able to trick, coerce, or otherwise manipulate others into performing evil acts without caring or even realizing it (bonus points for revealing everything later and making the victims go suicidally and/or homicidally insane as a result) and thus it makes much more sense that they keep getting off scot free. It's much more satisfying and meaningful to kill anywhere from 1 to thousands with a little trickery and intimidation especially over a long period of time than just with something akin to the flick of a switch. Now that I think about it, this applies to good actions for much the same reasons.

In short, it's better to entice all the townspeople to slaughter each other than to just blow the place up.

OT: Most evil thing... that's a good question. I'm a real ripe bastard in video games whenever I play evil, so I would be picking from a long list. I've done most of what everybody has mentioned here so far though.

Once in Skyrim, I killed every vigilant of stendarr in the Hall of the Vigilant. That is evil on it's own, but mostly it was the way I went about it.

My character had decent skill in both conjuration, destruction and one-handed weapons. So I attacked by summoning a frost archon to tank them while blasting away with destruction magic and draining their souls, finishing off the survivors with a Bound Sword. Then I raised them all as zombies and decapitated them. And after having trapped their souls in torment and turned their coprses to dust, I went outside and found two vigilants who had discovered nothing. So I stabbed them in the back and repeateded the process.

There is no quest that requires you to kill the vigilants, it's just something I did. I usually play as a good character, and I try to do that in Skyrim too, but sooner or later I accidently kill some innocent villager, and what follows isn't so much a fall from grace as it's a nosedive into insanity.

twistedmic:In Fallout 3 I blasted Megaton into radioactive rubble and sold several people into slavery, though that wasn't very recent.

Same. I'd never done an evil karma playthrough and thought I'd give it a try. The slavery mission to Little Lamplight grossed me out though.

CannibalCorpses:I like to set up corpses in sexual positions on Fallout...is that evil enough? :)

I do that too. Funny as that is though, there are other things besides sexual positions - little tragic tableaux that can be set up - like the depressed alcoholic (take one decapitated corpse and sit against the wall surrounded by two or three empty whiskey bottles with a sawn-off shotgun in his/her lap), the OD'd junkie (one corpse, stripped on a bed with surgical tubing and empty syringes), the Jigsaw torture victim (a heavily damaged corpse, as many of the bits as you can find, and various items such as bonesaws, medical braces, egg-timers and powder charges), the list goes on and on.

I usually play the good guy in my games (I am the guy who finished KotOR I and II about twelve times combined and always on light side), but there were a few times I decided to experiment, mostly in the Elder Scrolls games.

As the others have noted beforehand, Skyrim in particular is chock full of monstrous acts, mostly related to the Dark Brotherhood and the Daedric Princes, but one can be a horrible human being without that as well if one just stops for a moment and thinks of what they are doing.

For example, killing giants. Those guys, while very protective of their territory, is generally harmless. If you sheat your weapon when near them they never bother you and just tend to their business... and you can murder them in cold blood just for the lulz (and their toes). Sure, you can kill villagers and travelers and anyone just like that, but in case of the giants you are not told it's a bad thing and you actually have to stop and think about it to realize that what you did was completely unjustified.

There are also some of the fortresses that you can "clean out". The ones inhabited by necromancers or bandits are relatively unambiguous, but doing the same for imperial or stormcloak troopers, who might be just conscripted youth doing their duty, is a bit more iffy.

If we are at that, sandbox games in general are often like this, when you are doing something that seems like a completely natural thing at the moment, then after running over a hundred people with a car or massacring a town you just stop, look back and ask yourself, "Why did I do that again? This is horrible!"

Back in City of Heroes, playing as a villain, there was a quest to stop some vigilantes in the starting area.

To do this, you could manipulate a man who loved the woman in charge of the viligantes into letting you into their base, and convince him to kill her. When he realized what he had done, you could then murder him while mocking him about it all.

It's a shame most games go with "murderous" evil instead of "manipulative" evil.

Back when I was trying to get my legs wet with writing, I started "acting" as certain characters in WRPG's. A first iteration of one of my characters was an unspeakable horror. Wore heavy metal armor, welding mask, and carried a sledge hammer. FO3 had a uniquely named Sledge, but as this character, I killed everything. Going to a town, I murdered everything in it. Megaton? No problem. Blew that shit up. Ten-penny tower? No neighbors.

Mind you, for gameplay reasons, I had to talk to a few people before I went on said rampage. Lamplight was a no-fly zone. (Maybe he spared kids to create more monsters?) That wasn't the final iteration of this particular character. So, I think the most unspeakable evil thing I've done was sneaking around a town, murdering every single person. One by One.

I once modded Fallout 3 to make Little Lamplight's citizens mortal. Then I made them run away from a molerat... into a carefully placed minefield trap. Anyone who got out met my sniper rifle.

More recently, in Watch Dogs I have no damn morals about hacking bank accounts (Mainly because I'm terrible at the $10,000 Poker game and I want that special bike). Friend died? HACK. Cancer survivor? HACK.

I've committed countless atrocities in many open world games. Causing as much chaos as possible never seems to get old.

Some people have said this already, but blasting Megaton into oblivion for caps and a sweet apartment, also selling innocents into slavery. I've always been a fan of the Dark Brotherhood, too. A favourite mission is being sent to a party with a bunch of other guests locked in a house trying to find a hidden chest of gold. Actually, there is no gold, and all those people are there because I'm supposed to kill them, and I do so by tricking them into slaughtering themselves.

When I got bored in RDR I'd often tie people up and put them in front of trains, or try and bait animals into eating them. Either that or I'd lasso prostitutes outside the saloons and drag them about with my horse. Getting 'refunds' from hookers in GTA (generally through beating or stabbing) was also quite fun.

The Wykydtron:[quote="NuclearKangaroo" post="9.851733.21058080"][quote="The Wykydtron" post="9.851733.21057775"]Well on my high chaos ending in Dishonoured when Sam tells you he's through working with you because you've gone too far and starts to slowly sail away I shot him in the back and carried on. It felt like the right thing to do and to its credit, the game didn't give him invincibility frames on leaving which I half expected.

If only the game had anticipated my elaborate way of making Lady Boyle's assassination look like an accident. Let's just say there's a bath in her room and she's currently unconscious... Anything is better than the non-lethal option in that mission y'know. That shit was fucking chilling.

In that part in Dishonored, I killed Lady Boyle on one of my playthroughs and then gave her dead body to the guy in the basemen and watched him sail away thinking she was just asleep, hehehe...

For me, it's ironically painted as a good-guy option: Rewrite the geth heretics in Mass Effect 2. It's technically brain-washing, in that I strip the heretics of any individuality and autonomy they would of otherwise kept, all in the name of saving them from the Reapers. It's not like persuading organic characters using Paragon charm options, where the opposing parties still keep to their own opinions, but have to conform to my FemShep's standards as a result of being persuaded.

most evil thing in a game? hmm... i've played GTA4, killed all the people in the waiting room of the hospital, and then had long stand of with the cops, killing all of them as they kept of coming after me. that's pretty evil... killing everyone in sight in Infamous... shooting and killing Ashley in RE4 cause she was annoying me. um... tearing Wolverine in half in Spider-man Web of Shadows when I had the option of saving him, and i'm sure there are other times too